Merkel, Obama Join Neo-Cons
As Danger of World War Rises

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

December 2014

Dec. 5—The world is dangerously close to the brink of thermonuclear world war. If we do not change the course of the Obama Administration, the British government, NATO, and the EU, toward Russia and China, an uncontrolled escalation could wipe out the human race. Unfortunately, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, since her disastrous speech in Sydney, Australia, on Nov. 17, joined Obama as one of the main spokespersons for this confrontation policy.

Russia’s President Putin responded to this strategic situation in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on Dec. 4, with an unusually sober analysis. And people should look closely at the text of this speech[http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/23341] and think about it, rather than listening to the chorus from the lock-step media and the NATO flunkeys that write for it.

Speaking in the St. George Hall of the Kremlin before representatives of both houses of parliament and other dignitaries, Putin passionately appealed to the Russian people to defend Russia’s existence, just as they had done in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler. Concerning the sanctions, he stressed that even without the Ukraine crisis, the United States and its allies would have found some other pretext to curb Russia’s growing capacities. “The policy of containment was not invented yesterday,” he said. “It has been carried out against our country for many years, always, for decades, if not centuries. In short, whenever someone thinks that Russia has become too strong or independent, these tools are quickly put into use.”

Putin recalled—just hours after the start of a renewed terrorist attack in Grozny, Chechnya—the separatist wars in Chechnya, in which the West always described these murderers with blood on their hands as “rebels” and received them with high honors. “The support for separatism in Russia from across the pond,” he said, “including information, political and financial support provided by the special services, was absolutely obvious and left no doubt that they would gladly let Russia follow the Yugoslavia model of disintegration and dismemberment. It didn’t work. We didn’t allow that to happen. Just as it did not work for Hitler, with his misanthropic ideas, who set out to destroy Russia and push us back beyond the Urals. Everyone should remember how it ended.”

In an obvious reference to the situation in the EU, Putin added: “If for some European countries, national pride is a long-forgotten concept and sovereignty is too much of a luxury, true sovereignty for Russia is absolutely necessary for survival. I would like to emphasize this: Either we remain a sovereign nation, or we dissolve without a trace and lose our identity. Of course, other countries need to understand this too. All participants in international life should be aware of this.”

Opposition in Europe

It is important that now at least some people are speaking out against Merkel’s pursuit of confrontation, in which she is acting as a puppet of the war faction. Under the heading “War in Europe Again? Not in Our Name!” 60 distinguished figures from German political, economic, and cultural life directed an urgent warning to the German government, the Bundestag, and the media about the threat of war with Russia. The appeal was initiated by, among others, the former head of the Munich Security Conference, Horst Teltschik; former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former President Roman Herzog are among the signatories. The appeal states that every attempt historically to forcibly change Russia’s status as one of the recognized principal powers of Europe, was drowned in blood for those who attempted it, with the most recent being “Hitler’s megalomaniacal Germany, which set out in 1941 to murderously subjugate Russia.”

This statement implies clearly which tradition those calling for confrontation with Russia today represent. Faced with the danger that any war in Europe would come to the use of nuclear weapons, this comparison is indeed quite mild. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico warned recently, at a forum organized by the newspaper Hospodarske noviny, that there is a great danger that the conflict between Ukraine and Russia will expand into a larger conflict, involving more than just those two countries. “The likelihood of military conflict is 70%. I am talking now about a large military conflict; I’m not talking about a conflict between Russia and Ukraine,” he said.

Victoria Nuland’s Role

The key figure coordinating the Ukraine crisis and confrontation with Russia is Victoria Nuland, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, whose intercepted phone conversation with U.S. Ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt, made a name for her in history. In this conversation (on Jan. 28, 2014), she informed Pyatt that Vitali Klitschko, who was being backed by Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation as the next President of Ukraine, was undesirable, and that “our man Yats” (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) should get the post. Her additional statement, “F...k the EU,” revealed both her strange sexual preferences as well as her nasty manners. So much for the condition of democracy, in which elections are nothing but window dressing for the operation of “dark money”—in Ukraine as well as in the United States.

Nuland is one of those in the Obama Administration whose profile explains why nothing has changed from the imperial orientation of the Bush-Cheney Administration to Obama, but on the contrary, the same policies have continued, getting even worse.

Nuland is married to the neo-con Robert Kagan, one of the authors of the “New American Century” doctrine, with which the neo-cons responded to the collapse of the Soviet Union—namely the idea of establishing an Anglo-American Empire along the lines of the British Empire. Kagan was later a co-founder of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC), which was founded in 1999 on the initiative of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Haig, Stephen Solarz, and 100 other neo-cons from both American political parties.

The ACPC and its successor organization, the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, have been busy since then supporting the separatists in Chechnya and the Caucasus, and conducting regime-change operations against Russia. Most likely, it was this network that Putin had in mind when he spoke of operations launched from “across the pond.”

Nuland was principal deputy foreign policy advisor to Vice President Cheney in 2004, at the time of the first “Orange Revolution” against Ukraine—and she boasted in December 2013 that $5 billion had been spent on that since the end of the Cold War. In 2005, she was appointed by George W. Bush as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO for three years. As Assistant Secretary of State, she was, and is now, in charge of the Obama Administration’s policy toward Ukraine and Russia. And it didn’t seem to bother Chancellor Merkel for very long that her own phone was tapped by the NSA, nor that the German-backed Klitschko was dumped in favor of Nuland’s “Yats.”

There is a temporal relationship, however between Merkel’s confrontational speech in Sydney, which was celebrated by the Anglo-American media as “the end of the German Ostpolitik,” and Nuland’s various visits to Kiev, Berlin, and the Baltic States. In October, Nuland traveled to Berlin, where, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Aspen Institute, she gave a bloodthirsty speech in which she not only compared Putin’s actions in Crimea to the atrocities of ISIS in Mosul and the spread of Ebola in Africa, but also turned on full theatrical pathos for the benefit of the audience, which was composed of Berliners, who would therefore vividly remember the time of Europe’s division: “And that is precisely why we can and must work together on land, on sea, and in the air to make sure every member of our NATO family feels equally secure. Feels as secure as you feel here in Berlin. Whether that means funding our militaries, whether that means modernizing our forces and making sure that the equipment works, or whether it means demonstrating our resolve to use that equipment as necessary whether in Article 5 defense or globally.”

Using this equipment globally means, in so many words, waging thermonuclear war.

China Speaks Out

A day after Putin’s speech, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Russian news agency TASS: “We watched the Russian President’s statement with great interest. Russia is our good neighbor and a comprehensive strategic partner. The level of trust and cooperation between our countries is very high.” She added, “We respect the road taken by the Russian nation, including its domestic and foreign policies. China is determined to keep building up the strategic partnership with Russia.”

One day later, President Xi Jinping said, at a two-day conference of the People’s Liberation Army, that the production of sophisticated military equipment must be accelerated.

In the United States, Lyndon LaRouche has demanded that Nuland be removed from office, because getting rid of this important go-between could at least stop the escalation to war.

As for Chancellor Merkel, she should either immediately stop the sanctions against Russia and return to peaceful cooperation, while also taking up the offer by President Xi Jinping to cooperate with other European nations and the United States in the development of the New Silk Road—or she should take an early retirement.

Thank you for supporting the Schiller Institute. Your contributions enable us to publish, sponsor conferences, and support other activities which are critical interventions into the policy making and cultural life of the nation and the world.